I'm stating the obvious, I know, but every single pregnancy decision you make is rife with potential controversy. Absolute strangers feel perfectly fine in their own heads about offering their opinions, advice, or finger-shaking at the slightest provocation.

I'll never forget the night I went to a dinner party and it came up that we were going to find out the sex of the baby. "Oh, I wouldn't do that," one old biddy advised me, "You really should be surprised." I'm sorry lady, but do I even know your name? More to the point, do you know mine?!

Luckily, my backbone was firmly in place and I calmly and decisively delivered my prepared statement: "We think it's a surprise at any point in pregnancy, and I'd rather not be hopped up on drugs when we do find out." Then I braced myself for the unasked-for lecture on unmedicated births, but happily, I was spared that.

This is the deal: your pregnancy, your decisions. Unless you are causing physical harm to yourself or your baby, no one has the right to make you feel guilty or like a bad mother. NO ONE.

And that goes for your food choices as well. A fellow pregnant friend had to deal with a co-worker, who was all Judgey McOpinionPants that my friend hadn't given up sugar for her pregnancy.

Personally, this pregnancy turned me into a Salt Vampire. Usually fairly light-handed in my application of salt in the past, I have really been piling it on recently. Which is odd because with my pregnancy-endowed super smeller, it would seem to follow that I've got a super taster as well, right? So why the need to increase my blood pressure?

Well, some articles, books, or blog posts might tell me that I'm craving salt because the baby wants minerals he's otherwise lacking. These same articles also tell me that I don't want chocolate because the baby is telling me to eat healthy food. So, then I gotta ask: what is said baby is trying to tell me when I crave McDonald's cheeseburgers, Safeway doughnuts, and root beer?

Look, I know there are pregnant chicks out there who make the irrevocable decision to eat healthy, healthy, healthy their entire pregnancy and that's admirable, it really is. However, for me, it wasn't at all reasonable in the first trimester. And by "reasonable" I mean, "either I eat this bag of Cheetos or the kid starves because everything else is making me nauseous."

Ironically, I was a fairly healthy eater before I got pregnant. I ate mostly grains, legumes, and vegetables with fish and some meats mixed in. I didn't overdo it in the dessert department, and I tried to restrain my rampant cheese obsession. Also, we mostly cooked at home with only occasional dinings-out.

That all went out the window in weeks 6-13 where I scarfed every possible item of junk food known to man and couldn't bear to set foot in the kitchen.

At my first doctor's appointment, I had to fill out a sheet describing what I had eaten in the previous week. This was my menu: hot dogs, grilled cheese, cookies, Totino's pizza, apples, crackers, water. My UCSF midwife smiled at the list. "This reads like one of my pregnant teenagers," she commented. I hurriedly told her that normally I was a really healthy eater and that I knew I had to get good stuff in my body for the baby. She calmed me down and said it was perfectly normal and no, I wasn't already a bad mother.

After I got past my nauseous stage, my body went back to allowing in all the stuff from my old diet without kicking up a mighty, bathroom-dashing fuss.

What I'm trying to say is, pregnancy is stressful enough as it is, so if you're craving "bad food," try not beat yourself up about it. Can you go overboard and eat ten donuts a day for every day of your pregnancy? Sure, all things in moderation and so on, but the upshot is, it's only nine months, you'll get your body back on track.

I have a confession to make. For a couple of weeks in April, I allowed my daughters to place a little bag of Doritos in their lunch boxes. Many people will think I'm ridiculous for feeling this is something to confess to, but I know a lot of you out there struggle with the same feelings I have about junk food. I never thought I'd feed my kids processed food, but after a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that a few Doritos were actually good for them.

Okay, they're not good for their health or digestive system (obviously), but they may just be good for their general ideas about food and food consumption. Many people will disagree with this statement, but hear me out.

When I first started packing my daughters' lunches in Kindergarten, I would include organic yogurt, tofu bologna and turkey sandwiches, apples slices or strawberries, cheese, and a slew of other healthy choices. They devoured these meals, each day returning with empty lunch boxes and happy faces. In first grade, they started to tell me about other kids' lunches. They started to become very opinionated about the visual buffet before them each lunch period. I got some ideas from the other moms, such as sending miso soup in a thermos and chopping up fresh mozzarella cheese with grape tomatoes for a side salad. Meanwhile, my daughters started to question the lunches some of their schoolmates brought each day. Why did some kids get bright orange chips in a bag while they never did, and what were those yellow plastic lunch trays with pizza and nachos in them (the answer was Lunchables, a mass-produced Kraft product advertised to look fun, with it's own game site marketed to unwitting kids)?

I explained what these things were, noting that everyone's food choices were a personal matter best discussed in their own families, while also making it clear that those food choices weren't mine. Meanwhile, I continued with my own school-lunch repertoire and thought all was fine and good until my daughters started reporting on who had "unhealthy" lunches. I quickly found out who had Lunchables, who had Ding Dongs, and who had Doritos in their backpacks. I started to feel uncomfortable with the sanctimonious tone my daughters used when ratting out their peers, and cringed when one said that my lunches were healthy because I loved them (which seemed to imply the kids with Lunchables were unloved).

And then, early this year, one of my daughters repeatedly told me about a few girls who would dangle Doritos in front of her face each day. When she told me about this, she said she wouldn't want the Doritos anyway because they weren't good for her, but I could see how much she wished she could eat just one of those bright orange chips. She was saying what she thought I wanted hear (that Doritos were bad), but inwardly craving the junk food she was seeing in other kids' lunches. When I asked her to honestly tell me if she wanted some, she admitted she did.

My first instinct was to say "too bad," but then I decided that at 7 ½, she was old enough to be an active participant in her own food choices. I was also concerned that in my attempts to give my daughters a nutritious energy-filled meal at school and speak honestly with them about nutrition, I had instead somehow equated homemade sandwiches and cut up vegetables and fruit with being "good," while at the same time transforming junk food into a "forbidden fruit." I began to wonder if one day, maybe in high school or college, they would rebel by gorging themselves on Twinkies and Cap'n Crunch.

I was also concerned that I was raising them in a bubble of food elitism, where we were smug locavores and everyone who ate otherwise was gastronomically bankrupt. Even worse, they seemed completely ignorant of the fact that healthy food is simply more expensive than processed food, and that much of the world is striving to get enough food to eat at all, let alone organic and locally raised. As I didn't want to get into a prolonged discussion about the farm bill with my two 7-year olds, I thought that in addition to trying to inform them about food with age-appropriate discussions, I would also help them learn to make their own nutritional decisions. Let them eat cake (or rather processed chips), while telling them what's in them (i.e., why they are such a bright orange and why they taste different than regular corn chips). They're smart girls and I thought it was time for them to start thinking about this stuff on their own.

It was through this reasoning that I found myself buying a box of small bagged Doritos. I looked at my daughters in the grocery store aisle and said, "So, is this what you really want in your lunch?" Both looked at me wide-eyed. "Yes. We really really want them," they yelled with huge smiles. As I placed the Doritos into my cart, I tried not to frown. I hated buying this crap for my kids, but I also didn't want to create little eaters who feel superior about their cut red peppers while longingly eyeing other kids snacks. By taking away the stigma of processed foods, I was hoping to also take away the allure. I was hoping that the road to a lifetime of loving vegetables and slow food just might start with a small bag of Doritos once or twice a week.

Has anyone else out there struggled with their kid's desire to have junk food? If so, how did you handle it?

Update: I included the Doritos in my daughters' lunches for about two weeks. I never asked them if they wanted them. They had to initiate putting the bags in their lunch boxes themselves. This week, however, they seem to have forgotten that those little red bags even exist. When making their lunches in the morning, we have included the normal peanut butter and jam sandwiches, yogurt, cut up fruit and homemade popcorn, along with other standard choices. No one has asked for Doritos or even acknowledged that they're sitting in the pantry. I'm hoping that by making then accessible, they're no longer so appealing and therefore ancient history.